The latest tranche of documents released by the Department of Justice related to its investigation of Jeffrey Epstein contains 842 occurrences of the word pizza, which seems like a lot. By comparison, the word hamburger appears only 190 times, while the phrase “sex with children” appears 20 times — including in some kind of tract sent to the FBI with the impenetrable title “Sex Collectors Hallett Tony Blair Cullen Gordon Brown British Intelligence MI 6 MI 5 Dunblane Pedophiles nwo illuminati freemasons,” as well as in this photograph that Epstein’s brother Mark provided the agency in 2020:

These two artifacts represent two ends of the evidentiary spectrum: a seemingly explicit indication that somebody was abusing kids and getting blackmailed and threatened for it, and a dispatch from the most fevered corners of the conspiracy-minded internet. You would think the conspiracists would be thrilled by the blackmail stuff, but for the time being they have focused their attention on the pizza.

Admittedly, some of the pizza-related material seems pretty weird. An April 2018 message from a redacted sender says, “lets go for pizza and grape soda again. No one else can understand. Go kno.” Cryptic! Some of it is scrutable: “Go kno” appears to be a rendering of go know, an English derivative of the Yiddish expression geh vays, which is roughly equivalent to “go figure.” The claim that “no one else can understand,” on the other hand, is a creepy element that echoes Donald Trump’s allusion to “wonderful secrets” in his infamous letter on the occasion of Epstein’s 50th birthday. This combination is the essence of the latest cache: Some questions yield to research; others are stubborn but tantalizing, inviting readers to fill in the blanks with what they could not possibly know.

“Pizza and grape soda” belongs to the latter category, and it appears frequently in Epstein’s emails and texts. In a 2018 exchange with his urologist, Harry Fisch (who erroneously appears in Epstein’s contacts as “Harry Fish”), the two seem to discuss refilling Epstein’s prescription for erectile-dysfunction medication. Fisch later texts, “After you use them, wash your hands and lets [sic] go get pizza and grape soda.” This proposal seems odd. There are many things you can do after your Viagra kicks in, and getting a slice with your doctor is not near the top of the list. In another context, it might just be funny, but the confluence of pizza and grape soda with Epstein — a man increasingly known for exactly one thing — and boner pills is enough to drive a reasonable person to conjecture.

Remember when only unreasonable people thought like this? The idea that pizza could be a code word for illicit sexual activities was laughable in 2016, when the so-called Pizzagate conspiracy captured the imaginations of what might charitably be called the internet’s most enthusiastic users. The theory, which emerged after WikiLeaks publicly released the personal emails of........

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